A blog for reason and logic.
Topics: science, philosophy, politics, history

Friday, August 30, 2013

Overcoming Religious Irrationalism

The continuous progress of human
civilization was suddenly interrupted at the end of antiquity with the rise of
Christianity to the head of the Roman Empire and its subsequent fall. No other
event was so disastrous for the intellectual evolution of mankind. It was
followed by an Age of Darkness that lasted more than a thousand years, until
humanity began slowly to recover from the catastrophic effect that Christian
monotheism had brought over it. It was the Renaissance (= Rebirth) of antiquity
and its culture followed by the Age of Enlightenment that put an end to the
decline of humanity.

However the cause of the decline is not
dead yet and we can again see the deteriorating effects of this dangerous
religion on the progress of humanity. Religion is again on the rise during the
last decades, and it is accompanied by a visible stagnation of science and
technology, a retrocession of humanist values and basic human rights and a
resurgence of barbarism and violence all over the world. The disease of
Christianity (including the Mohammedan sects) has not been eradicated while
there was an opportunity for it. It will now continue to cause problems for
mankind and obstruct any further progress.

The mistake was the attempt to jump from a
monotheist religion right back to the path of reason and logic. Such an attempt
was doomed to fail. Once you have taken a wrong road, you cannot just jump from
there back into the right direction, when you realize that you have taken a
wrong turn. You have to take all the way back to the point where you have left
the right path and from there continue into the right direction.

There is no direct path from monotheism to
reason. A Christian atheist still has tacit Christian doctrines implied in his
thinking. For example whatever answer he gives to the simple question “Do you
believe in God?” - whether “yes” or “no”, he already strays away from the path
of reason and surrenders to multiple Christian fallacies. The preposition “in”
makes no sense in conjunction with the verb “believe”. Why is the noun “God”
capitalized? Where is its article?

Such an irrational question cannot be
answered rationally and could only be countered with another question: Believe
what about which god? Any answer would imply the concept of an omnipotent
creator and the affirmation that such a concept is even thinkable. The whole
question of the existence of “God” is meaningless from a rational point of view
and commits the fallacy of presupposition (Plurium Interrogationum)
since it presupposes statements that have not been agreed upon (that an
omnipotent creator is a valid hypothesis, that the world has a beginning, that
there can be a logical distinction between natural and supernatural).

Whenever such a Christian atheist makes a statement
about ethics, he is also unaware that he implies tacit Christian values. He
also uses a language polluted by Christian terminology that makes it difficult
to express himself without falling into the mental trap of Christian concepts.

For a monotheist to embrace reason, it is
indispensable to return to the pre-Christian concepts of thought first and at
least formally learn classical mythology and adopt the customs and language of
polytheist antiquity. This is the point in history, after which mankind strayed
away from the path of intellectual progress.

Only a classical polytheist is able to
overcome religious superstition. From monotheism there is no direct shortcut to
rationalism. First all false concepts of Christianity and its spiritual
predecessors like Zoroastrism have to be totally erased from the mind, before
it is possible to advance on the path of reason.